A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center drew an already more or less well-known conclusion: the population of undocumented immigrants in the United States has remained stable in spite of everything, including the economic crisis and the record number of deportations by the Obama administration.
The half-measures meant to deal with this matter have also remained steady.
This past Thursday, the House Subcommittee on Immigration conducted a hearing on the E-Verify program that determines the immigration eligibility of newly hired workers using the data banks of the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Currently, this is a voluntary pilot program, but the new Republican leadership intends to make it obligatory for all of the nation's businesses.
According to these Republicans, the program will free up jobs for citizens of the United States; however, this premise ignores that a real choice for the 11.1 million undocumented immigrants who live among us remains unsolved.
An improved E-Verify system will work only in conjunction with a comprehensive immigration reform that brings order to the undocumented labor force, a vital component of some sectors of our economy.
Otherwise, it will become simply one more fiscally wasteful program that tries to put a band-aid over one problem area without addressing to patient's more serious wounds. And I am not the one who is saying this but Congress' own Budget Office (CBO), in a 2008 analysis of a bill introduced in 2007 that wanted to expand the E-Verify program.
According to the CBO, the measure in question would reduce federal income by $17.3 billion over a period of 10 years. The reason: "The obligatory verification through the E-Verify system to determine eligibility to work will result in an increase in the number of undocumented workers who would be paid outside the tax system."
That is to say, the undocumented workers who now pay taxes, through the Social Security system, for example, would move to other jobs which do not report their income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
What we need are bosses and employees who pay the taxes mandated by law. Perpetuating an undocumented workforce contributes nothing to the equation or to our economy.
In addition, according to the CBO, implementing the program will require an outlay of $23 billion over a period of 10 years.
And what about the industries that depend upon an undocumented labor force, like agriculture? Will they deport the harvests along with the workers? As far as anyone knows, there are no lines of U.S. citizens waiting anxiously to do this work. The effect would be a chain reaction since an estimated 3.1 million non-agricultural jobs depend on the agricultural industry.
Nor is E-Verify exempt from the mistakes that would affect workers who are citizens or legal residents. A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that improvements, however, "errors in E-Verify persist."
On the one hand, Republicans like Elton Gallegly, the president of the Subcommittee on Immigration, who is pushing for the obligatory expansion of the E-verify program, believes that this is the only way to resolve the problem [of undocumented workers being employed]. On the other, you have the Obama administration congratulating itself for the increase in the number of deportations, 774,000 in the last two fiscal years, of the silent raids and on the improvements to E-Verify.
Even though DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano that all these "achievements" will improve with comprehensive immigration reform, we are unclear what it is they are doing – if anything at all – to push it forward in this new congress.
Since both sides appear to have so much in agreement in the policing measures, one is forced to continue to ask what they are planning to do with the steady 11.1 million undocumented immigrants, who, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, remain here.
Some call for "deportation" and others for "reform," but so far there appears to be no clear solution.
